


i love you atlantic

by ghostwit



Category: One Piece
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Canon, Uhh. that's it. No other relevant tags ig.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:06:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26326849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostwit/pseuds/ghostwit
Summary: Rayleigh’s sat in the captain’s quarters, back tight--spine straight, too straight, tense and quivering beneath the pale of his skin--and to the door, when Gaban enters.(Set after Roger disbands the Roger Pirates.)
Relationships: Gol D. Roger/Silvers Rayleigh, Silvers Rayleigh & Scopper Gaban, Some implied polyam too but like (rolls eyes)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 19





	i love you atlantic

**Author's Note:**

> Scopper Gaban literally kissable :\

Rayleigh’s sat in the captain’s quarters, back tight--spine straight, too straight, tense and quivering beneath the pale of his skin--and to the door, when Gaban enters. 

“Rayleigh,” he says, feather soft, words dragged low in his throat so they can skim his heart. 

“Fu-hu,” It’s half a word, half a gasp, choked off and smoldering in his chest, all smoky heat and glowing embers. A beat passes between them, the air strung tight with an expectant tension. Scopper steps forward, the wood creaking underfoot, unfamiliar with his tread. 

He lists forward, taking the brunt of the spike of conqueror’s haki threading through liminal space and pressing against Gaban’s consciousness like shrapnel. The mirror shatters in its frame, scattering glittering shards of glass across their vanity; It, too, was tired, it seems, fracturing all at once in a crescendo of exhausted white noise. 

“Sorry,” he mutters before it can tamp itself down, slumping forward on an outbreath. His throat is quivering and his head lowers to press his chin to his clavicle, hair splaying in a golden fan across the planes of his back. Part of Gaban balks at the intimacy, the vulnerability he’s offering, lacking the delicate instruments needed to pick open the inner workings of the Dark King, the force to blast them apart lovingly. The calluses on his thumbs slot perfectly in a notch on the wooden handle of his axes, but the cool, coiled hilt of a rapier is foreign.

“Hey, hey, Vice, it’s alright.” Root him, offer him his position back without the expectation of duty.  _ You’re still his. He still wants you.  _ “Okay if I sit?” 

Rayleigh laughs, sparkling like dirtied champagne bubbles as they fight their way to the surface, "Intruding on our marital bed already, Gaban?" Any other time, he would've laughed, thrown a knife's edge grin back at Rayleigh and pressed a teasing kiss to Roger's knuckles--it was no secret among the crew, that their captain loved and was loved freely and readily, even in his deepest of entanglements with their first mate--but Roger isn't here, so he winces instead. Still, Rayleigh scooches across the mattress with an easygoing handwave, duvet still bunched in his lap, a juvenile action that makes the fragile set of his shoulders seem boyish in the lamplight. 

“It’s fine, I know you’re trying.” he turns to face Gaban, smiles with his lips stretched thin around his teeth, lopsided and achingly earnest. He’s on the verge of tears.

“I mean it, Rayleigh. It’s alright.” Another second of suspended animation with the world taut, Gaban has spent too much not-time in this not-space these past couple hours, before Rayleigh crumples, the  _ twang _ of a bowstring, face screwing inwards into an ugly, pained grimace. It’s too late, for careful tread and delicate words, and it seems no one else is up to the task.

“Fuck,” he spits out, something bitter and black on his lips, curling into himself with a pained gasp. Hiccups devolve into laughter, and Gaban crowds him, loops his arms around those shuddering shoulders until Rayleigh can turn to face him. Rayleigh's nose nudges against his collarbone, face settling along the left half of the deep V that forms his collar to soak fabric and skin alike in tears that shed unbidden. They tighten their grip on each other, fingers fisting in cotton and pulling blood to skin, and Gaban dips his head into Rayleigh's hair, stutters his way into a deep breath. 

"It's not fucking fair--always does this to me--always his fault, his mess, leaves me behind to clean it up--leaves me behind, left me behind, fuck, fuck, I want to go--please, selfish, let me--fuck." Each word strangled, croaking and teetering as they spill past his teeth in a torrent of snot. His chest heaves, breath accelerating into lessened intervals before slowing in a deliberate two-second inhale and three-second exhale, whistling cold through his nose--before picking back up, wheezing up the ragged column of his throat in another frenzy. 

Gaban can feel the cringe pressed to his clavicle, scarred eye crinkling in equal parts hurt and embarrassment, “Please, let me--I, fuck--”

Maybe something else: shame, fear, something, twisting his features with a complication Gaban couldn’t hope to understand without the ease and simplicity of their captain.

"Fuck, miss him too, it's okay." Gaban says, teeth buried deep in his lip to keep the waver from overcoming the words, garbling them like Rayleigh's mutterings. His vice captain’s arms spasm, sporadic twitches of the muscle tracing up from fisted hands to his shoulder blades and along his neck, and Gaban runs a two-fingered salute over each pulse of motion, slow, before uncurling his hands to grip the skin along his nape. Fuck. It’s too hard. 

“It’s alright,” choked out around a half-formed sob, and Rayleigh mouths the words in repeat, Gaban can feel his mouth on his skin where his lips brush the outlines of consolation over his throat. Another word, too.  _ Help. _

An open-palmed double thump to his shoulder blades, nails digging into skin when they pull back. Face pressed deep in Rayleigh’s hair, breath clotted. A wet cough into the hollow of Gaban’s throat. Ragged breath and red-rimmed eyes and not-time not-space stretching like the pull of taffy on exposed nerves.  _ I miss him.  _

__ _ I miss him. I miss him. I miss him.  _

And all at once, Gaban rooting through the depths of his devotion for something,  _ anything _ to  _ say _ to one of the men he owes his life, Rayleigh stops. Goes tight in his arms, quiet, before falling back to lie supine. He tosses a leg over Gaban’s folded thighs, casual, shoots him another tired smile that twists sour in his heart with a sense of hurt, breathes out in a slow rattle of snot and composure. 

The brunts of his palms pressed to his brow, pushing rays of color past the dark of his lowered eyelids. A lift in the corner of his mouth, quirking to show gums. Again, genuine, but something resilient in the exposure, gratitude and loss rolling into an outbreath that tailspins into a laugh. Gaban finds his hand in the sheets, slumps back to sit beside him. 

The minutes roll slow, sticky from second-to-second, Rayleigh breathing in time. The North star is displaced in the sky, knocked loose as history pivots. Already, Gaban--former, former primary combatant of the Roger Pirates--can feel the floor opening up black and jagged between them, the broken mirror glinting up at them in the dark to fracture their features and reflect them a million times over. Their captain, the world and its machinations, turning him outside-in and doing the same. 

“Thank you,” Gaban says, shoulders jumping, words having cleared his brain completely to vault his tongue with a sense of lonely desperation, “You’ve served us well, Vice.” 

Rayleigh throws his forearm over his eyes, dampening it with tears. His laugh turns a shade bitter, the barest degree resigned--he does, learn quickly, after all--and he gives their joined hands a squeeze. 

**Author's Note:**

> It's about (gestures wildly) an end to everything you've ever loved in such an abrupt, succinct way but also--no, not at all, sitting on the verge of destruction for months and living in the wreckage for years and years and years afterwards and mourning before you've even begun to lose and. kdjuyksydhflsgfku!! Wanting and not being able to have, fundamentally and intrinsically. Yeah. 
> 
> Probably a concept/scene I'll revisit, so forgive me if I end up rewriting this sometime. 
> 
> Please leave a comment if you have any thoughts at all! It means a lot to me. Thank you for reading.
> 
> hazeism.tumblr.com


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